HOPE AND GLORIA
Need to take down a Mexican cartel? Just get a makeup artist to handle it
Say what you will about this remake of a 2011 Mexican crime thriller, but the U.S. version has a kick-ass elevator pitch: Miss Congeniality meets Sicario, starring the lead actress from TV’s Jane the Virgin.
That would be Gina Rodriguez as Gloria, a San Diego makeup artist who travels to nearby Tijuana, Mexico, to help her best friend Suzu (Cristina Rodlo) in the Miss Baja Beauty Contest. (The film’s name, Miss Bala, is a Spanish-language pun, since it translates as “Miss Bullet.”)
Visiting a nightclub to meet the pageant’s pervy promoter (also the local police chief ), Gloria bumps into a gang of drug cartel types about to put a hit on the man. She and Suzu then get separated in the crossfire, and Gloria spends the rest of the movie looking for her friend.
She also spends the rest of the movie as a drug mule, and not the Clint Eastwood kind where you just drive, sing old Dean Martin tunes and have the occasional three-way. Due to an unwieldy set of circumstances, the cartel leader, played by the charismatic Ismael Cruz Cordova, has Gloria in his clutches. And the American drug-enforcement officials think she’s in cahoots and refuse to help.
It’s as if she walked out of a lion’s den and into an ambush of tigers.
Thus we have a Gloria-againstthe-world setup. With the exception of the missing Suzu, no one in this film is without sin. Rodriguez plays her character as smart and resourceful but a bit shell-shocked in the early going. She takes a while getting her badass on but (and at the risk of sounding like click-bait), you’ll never guess what happens when she does.
Miss Bala is directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who gave us troubled teenagers with 2003’s Thirteen and then the first Twilight movie, before being fired from that franchise and disappearing into smaller fare; her last film, 2015’s Miss You Already, grossed all of $1.1 million.
The movie has its flaws, including on-the-nose soundtrack choices and a few logistical holes where viewers will be thinking: “Wait, can’t she just get away now?” Well, maybe; I’ve never been nabbed by a cartel, so I don’t know what effect it can have on your judgment. I do know that the film falls into that cliché where a noisy firefight slowly peters out for no other reason than to let two main characters have a standoff without any distractions.
But winter is a time for managing cinematic expectations. January has already underwhelmed (Glass), under-er-whelmed (Replicas) and under-est-whelmed (Serenity). Miss Bala, opening on Groundhog Eve and not completely terrible, may indicate a change in the weather. And it offers this odd alert: “Based on the Spanish-language film.” That’s Hollywood-ese for: “You won’t have to read too many subtitles.” And also: “We changed the ending.”